Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most of the people who will jam the Brattle for the next two weeks have seen Casablanca at least once, and will see it once again not because they remember the complex plot of intrigue and love and compromised virtue, but because each actor made his character indelible...
...emphatic, externalized manner. Bert Lahr's performance is harder to appraise: he is in a sense too good for French farce without always being entirely right for it. His clowning has always a certain human appeal; his zany genius is rooted in character and a little disrupted by plot. His own timing is flawless, but too personal for pacing flat, stylized farce. He doubtless gives the play something extra. But if Hotel Paradiso lacks the sustained period-farce verve of last season's The Matchmaker, it may partly be because Lahr is not Ruth Gordon's equal...
Steam & Sentiment. What Anger lacked in plot, sense and good taste it made up for in steam and sentiment. If Playwright Osborne succeeded in being only half-acid, his admirers did not seem to mind. One evening last autumn Sir Laurence Olivier went backstage after a performance, politely wondered aloud if Osborne might have a part for him in any new play. Very much in character, Osborne superciliously replied: "I don't know-possibly." Then he began remixing a batch of anger in process called The Entertainer so that its lead-a sodden, cynical, third-rate music-hall trouper...
...Novelist Calder Willingham (who attended The Citadel in 1940). The movie may stimulate some furious second-thinking in many readers who (like James T. Farrell) thought that Willingham had made "a permanent contribution to American literature." With most of its sensationally fleshy parts removed, the bare-bones plot stands revealed as no more-and no less-than a cleverly constructed thriller...
...already learned that it is not enough to torture people-the real satisfaction comes when they can be made to beg for it. By an intricate series of Machiavellian maneuvers, De Paris involves four cadets, who think the whole sinister business is an almost innocent practical joke, in a plot. The idea is to siphon a mort of whisky through an enema nozzle into a fifth cadet and deposit his senseless body on the quadrangle one dark night. Next morning, when the boy is found and expelled from the academy for drinking on the campus. Jocko's hands...